Flinx's Folly

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Yes, clr!rk,” Truzenzuzex added thoughtfully. “And what exactly do you mean by formerly?”

  “It’s not there anymore,” Flinx explained flatly. “It moved itself. Through circumstances too involved and complicated to relate here—”

  “Yet more discussion for later,” the thranx clicked under his breath.

  “—I found myself there in the middle of an altercation involving humans and AAnn. As the disagreement developed, the true nature of this construct made itself known. I . . . made contact with it, in much the same way I did with the Krang on Booster. This disguised world ship was dotted with Krangs—I don’t know how many.”

  “Exciting,” the thranx commented. “I wonder. If the projections from such devices could be combined and appropriately focused, would it be sufficient to make an impression on a menace of astronomical dimensions?”

  “It certainly sounds more promising than anything we’ve been able to come up with,” Tse-Mallory agreed. Black eyes bored into Flinx’s own. “You said it moved itself, Flinx. To where? Where did this world-size weapons platform go, and where is it now?”

  “To your questions, Bran: yes and I don’t know.” Flinx spread his hands helplessly. “It entered space-plus and vanished from the Pyrassian system. I can’t imagine where something that big and that ancient might want to go after being unexpectedly revived from the stasis in which it had been placed. I have no idea if it’s even still functional.”

  “If it is intact, it will still be functioning. Tar-Aiym technology was built to last.”

  “Perhaps it entered the Blight,” Truzenzuzex proposed, “in search of long-dead masters and additional instructions. Perhaps it never came back out of space-plus. Perhaps it emerged from space-plus inside a sun and was annihilated. We’ll never know if we don’t try to find out.”

  “And how do you propose to do something like that?” Clarity could not keep herself from asking.

  Both man and thranx gazed silently at Flinx. When he did not comment, Tse-Mallory prodded him. “You are our best hope for finding this potentially valuable artifact, Flinx. You’ve experienced that which is coming toward us, whatever it is, and you’ve engaged previously with Tar-Aiym weapons technology. Help us find it again.”

  Flinx would have fled, but a wall blocked his retreat. “Forget it! I want to get away from these things, not go looking for them.” Clarity put both arms around him and glared at the two scientists.

  “Ah.” Truzenzuzex dipped his head, the better to preen one antenna. “An unexpected element is added to the equation.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Tse-Mallory continued to force the issue. “Nothing here matters, Flinx. Not you, I, or anyone else in this room. Infinitely greater issues are at stake.”

  “What do you expect me to do,” Flinx snapped, “jump in a ship and go look for a massive object that by now could be anywhere in the cosmos?”

  “Not exactly look.” Truzenzuzex was less insistent than his companion. “You have at your disposal a unique means of perceiving, Flinx. Could it not be put to use in such a search?”

  “No!” Flinx shot back with sufficient vehemence to surprise even himself. Pip looked up but only briefly. “I am capable of sensing emotions in others, and sometimes projecting them. That’s all.”

  Not quite all, Clarity knew—but she was not about to volunteer such information.

  “You might be able to contact the device again, under the right circumstances.” Dripping with honeyed clicks and whistles, Truzenzuzex’s tone was annoyingly persuasive. “Bran and I could help you.”

  “Oh, really?” Flinx did not try to hide his disdain. “And exactly how might you do that?”

  “With training and advice,” Tse-Mallory told him without missing a beat. “Tru and I were both struck from the moment we first met you, Flinx, that your special potential was only partly realized. Clearly, that’s changed somewhat. With proper guidance, it might be changed significantly more.”

  Truzenzuzex rested his left truhand and foothand on Flinx’s leg. “No one knows what you are ultimately capable of, Flinx. Not Bran, not me, and certainly not you. Perhaps even something as improbable as becoming able to perceive the emotional state, and therefore the location, of a machine.”

  His words gave Flinx a jolt. He had discussed the same issue with the AI that controlled the functions of the Teacher.

  “If nothing else, Flinx,” Tse-Mallory continued compellingly, “you can help us physically search for something that only you have encountered and that only you may be capable of recognizing.”

  “At least, this appears to be our best hope for possibly countering this threat,” Truzenzuzex said, staring at him. Or at least, Flinx had the impression the thranx was staring. With those compound eyes it was always hard to tell. “Should something more efficacious come along, rest assured we will pursue it as a potential solution with equivalent vigor.”

  “You really intend to try and fight whatever’s coming.” Flinx’s gaze shifted back and forth between his two old friends.

  Truzenzuzex made a gesture indicative of unavoidable promise. “We will not put ourselves in stasis, as did the Sauun, and we will not run as the Xunca might have done, because we don’t know how to do either.” Four hands gestured meaningfully. “What else can we do but fight?”

  “Who else knows of the danger?” Flinx heard himself asking.

  “A few individuals who work in Commonwealth Science Central. Perhaps some others who may have come across the original report. It will not be more widely distributed. It would do no good to do so. Only panic and fear would ensue. Without reason, since the threat will not become imminent for several generations at the earliest.”

  “Though we can’t be sure of that,” Bran put in. “The phenomenon continues to accelerate.”

  “True,” the thranx admitted. “Bran and I will organize and initiate a search for this perambulating Tar-Aiym weapons platform because it offers the best chance for countering the approaching danger that has thus far been made known to us. Will you help us, Flinx? In return, we will attempt to tutor you, to edify you. To enlarge your knowledge of yourself. Isn’t that what you want? What you’ve always wanted?”

  Yes, yes! But not at the expense of any chance of real happiness. Not at the risk of losing what little serenity and joy he’d managed to scrape together from the shattered detritus of a damaged life. Though he’d spoken not a word, an alarmed Pip lifted her upper body to peer anxiously into his face and caress it with her tongue.

  He found he wanted to scream.

  For the first time in many years he had succeeded in talking about and sharing the particulars of his troubled inner self with someone else, shared them far more effusively than he had intended, but shared nonetheless. Did that mean that he loved Clarity Held? He loved Mother Mastiff; he knew that. And he loved Pip (at which thought the flying snake coiled in upon herself in a small paroxysm of delight). But did he love Clarity, or was he simply grateful for her sympathy and understanding? It would make a difference to know.

  More important, did she love him and could he trust such feelings? The older he grew, the more chary he became of human emotions. Better than most—perhaps better than anyone before or since, save for, possibly, certain poets—he knew how fleeting they could be. Could he build a life on such an insubstantial human ephemera? Did he want to try?

  What was the alternative? To continue his search for his father, since he now knew the disagreeable history of his mother. To travel and learn—to what end? Bran and Tru were offering instruction and training—perhaps the best he could hope to find anywhere. But at a price. Not much of a price, he reflected. They only wanted his help in trying to save the Commonwealth. No, not the Commonwealth, he corrected himself, the galaxy. Save the galaxy: it sounded like an ecologist’s bad slogan.

  Why should he? What did he owe the galaxy or the Commonwealth? Both had dealt him a raw deal. Let both disappear, smothered by whatever was advancing from behind the Grea
t Emptiness. Let everything start over fresh and new and clean.

  Except, if the astronomers were right, there was nothing behind the Great Emptiness. No material to make new stars and new planets, much less new civilizations. There would be no fresh start in this corner of the cosmos. He cringed inwardly.

  Some people were anxious about bills. Some fretted about their marriages, their kids, or the career promotion that might never come. Some were concerned for their health. Me, he thought, I’m expected to worry about the fate of a couple hundred million stars and a few civilizations. That, he reminded himself, and what to do about Clarity Held. Somehow in his mind the two had become linked.

  Because you’re the key, he told himself. The trigger of a triad consisting of an ancient artificial intelligence that he had long since decided involved the Krang, an intense green something that he had come to suspect concerned the life-forms of Midworld, and a mysterious warm sapience as yet unidentified. Could the latter consist of his inscrutable friends from the proscribed world called Ulru-Ujurr? If so, why didn’t they admit their involvement? It wasn’t like the jovial, furry manipulators of time and space to be deliberately obscure. And if they were not the third component of the resistive harmony he kept encountering in his dreams, then who was?

  I don’t want to be a key, he cried inwardly. I don’t want to be a trigger. I want to lead a normal life!

  Sure, he told himself more calmly. As a rogue genetic mutation that’s the creation of a universally reviled, outlawed medical group. A normal life. With Clarity Held? Agonized, he looked at her and saw that she felt his pain. Love? Or just empathy? Even for him it was hard to tell the difference.

  He was wavering, Clarity saw. Thinking of going with the human and thranx. Of leaving her again. Just when she thought she had forgotten all about him, he had come back into her life and turned it upside down again. What did he want from her? What did she want from him? How could you live with and love someone who knew what you were feeling even when you might not be certain yourself?

  She wavered, he vacillated, and the two minidrags, mother and offspring, were no less confused than their respective humans.

  What about your headaches? Flinx reminded himself. Can you place that burden on Clarity? She’s already seen what they can do to you. How can you ask her to be with you when the next pain in your skull might kill you? She has a good life here on New Riviera—she’s told you so. Do you have the right to ask her to leave that just to help you with your problems? And even if she were to agree, would it be the right thing to do?

  He was aware that they were all watching him, waiting, anxious to hear what he would decide. Bran and Tru in the hope that he would agree to go with them and help them. Clarity in the hope that—in the hope that . . .

  What did Clarity Held really want? Was she more certain what she wanted than he? If he didn’t know what he wanted, how could he trust her to know what she wanted? He responded to the inquiring stares as he had so often done when confronted by difficult situations in the past. He stalled.

  “Since you’ve been in contact with members of the scientific community,” he asked Truzenzuzex, “have they been able to determine how fast this shadowy section of the cosmos is advancing toward the Commonwealth and when it might begin to affect us?”

  Truzenzuzex looked up, a purely instinctive gesture of the kind that even thranx Philosophs are subject to.

  “It’s approaching at a slight angle to the plane of the galactic ecliptic,” he replied. “The area in question is so vast that velocities are not constant throughout, or so I have been led to understand. While an averaging is not precise, it is the best that can be hoped for until better measurements can be taken.” Flinx saw multiple visions of himself mirrored in the manifold lenses of the thranx’s eyes. Each one was slightly different from the one next to it—as were his own multiple visions of himself.

  “Suffice to say, krr!lt, that neither the Commonwealth nor any portion of our immediate galactic environs will begin to be affected until everyone in this room is long dead, and likely not until our offspring are also deceased. This estimation assumes, of course, that the phenomenon does not continue to accelerate. In that event, all current predictions are to be discarded. But as of now, we believe the first contact might not be felt for thousands of years or tens of thousands. Or outermost star systems could begin to be affected within a few hundred years. No sooner than that, I’m told, unless the rate of motion accelerates exponentially.”

  “A few hundred years,” Clarity murmured, “at the soonest.” When both thranx and man nodded, she turned sharply to Flinx. “Then there’s no hurry. There’s ample time to find a way to counter this entity.”

  “Provided,” Tse-Mallory reminded her softly, “the rate of acceleration does not increase. That is something we cannot predict. Knowing as little as we do about the nature of this phenomenon, we are of course equally ignorant of its capabilities.”

  “You’re asking Flinx to devote his immediate future and maybe even the rest of his life to combating something that won’t pose an actual threat until long after he’s dead.”

  Truzenzuzex gestured with a truhand. “Yes. That’s exactly what we’re asking him to do.”

  “Why should he?”

  Flinx gazed affectionately at her. She was giving voice to his thoughts. Was that an indication of love? She was arguing for his happiness.

  Not a complicated equation, he decided. His happiness versus the galaxy’s future. One man’s contentment versus the end of everything. As was so often the case, the choice was simple. Making it was the hard part.

  Tse-Mallory was watching him closely. So was Truzenzuzex. They were among the most important friends and mentors of his youth, now returned to ask his help in dealing with a far more momentous problem than whether an ancient artifact was a weapon, a musical instrument, or both. Their empathy, sincere and unrestrained, felt like a flow of soothing liquid warmth rushing through his mind. He believed he owed the Commonwealth nothing, the galaxy nothing. But what did Philip Lynx owe Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex?

  Others were involved. He met Clarity’s open gaze. His talent was fully active, sensitive to the feelings of everyone around him. “I’m confused, Clarity.” He smiled disarmingly. “It’s threatening to become an endemic condition. When I’m confused I try to turn for advice to those whose opinions I respect. I’ve known both these wanderers for a long time. I’ve known you for less but more intensely.”

  “Don’t you mean intimately?” She smiled, and he felt affection roll out of her like a wave.

  “I guess I mean both. I don’t know what to do. I really don’t. When I don’t know I have to ask. Clarity, I’m asking you. Just you. What do you think I should do?”

  She was taken aback. The forceful stares of the two scholars didn’t make it any easier. “That’s right, Flinx. Don’t ask about something simple and straightforward like you and me. Just place the future of the galaxy and humanxkind in my hands.”

  His smile became that same youthful, almost childlike grin that had first attracted her to him years ago on Longtunnel. But his tone was quietly serious. “What are real friends for, Clarity?”

  Slowly, she put both arms around his neck and lost herself in those deep green eyes. Eyes that had already seen far too much yet were full of the uncertainty of youth. Eyes behind which lay an incredible but still immature talent. Did she love him? Or did she feel sorry for him? Did she want to be with him always, or just help him overcome and survive? He had told her he didn’t know what to do, which implied he didn’t know what he wanted. What did she want? They were two confused people confounded by the options fate had dealt them, thrown together originally by circumstance and brought back together by need.

  Love by any other definition, she thought.

  The surge of raw emotion from both of them caused the two minidrags to coil themselves reassuringly around the forearms of their respective masters as well as around each other. Man, woman, and sna
kes formed an entwined whole. Behind them, Tse-Mallory was whispering something about human courtship rituals to the fascinated Truzenzuzex. Flinx and Clarity ignored them.

  “I don’t know what you should do, Flinx. You can’t ask me or anyone else to decide for you. I do know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you, helping you overcome the confusion and pain that torments you so. If I can.” Leaning forward, she kissed him. Tse-Mallory’s whispering acquired urgency.

  Eventually, their lips parted. “Clarity, if my headaches get any worse I may not have much rest of life left.”

  “I’ll take what I can. But at the same time, I can’t be that selfish. As much as I’d like for the two of us just to be together, I know you can’t put aside this calling you feel.” As she spoke, she toyed with strands of his hair. “Besides, I’d like our grandchildren—or great-great-grandchildren—to have a future. I suppose that means dealing with this thing that’s coming, however long it’s going to be before it gets here. I think the answer’s obvious. You need to help your friends find this mysterious weapons platform you encountered previously. You need to do whatever’s necessary to try to divert or destroy this oncoming malicious phenomenon. And you need to take me with you. That way you can do what has to be done, and we can still be together.” She looked resolutely back at their silent audience. “I can help you in ways they can’t.”

  Tse-Mallory responded with an avuncular smile. “If Flinx doesn’t object to your presence, then surely neither Tru nor I will.”

  Flinx found himself torn. “It would be wonderful if you could come with us, Clarity, but it’s liable to be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” She gazed back at him wide-eyed. “Where Philip Lynx goes? Why, such a possibility never occurred to me! I’m shocked, positively shocked!”

  Truzenzuzex gestured approvingly. “An attitude that might have come straight from one of the nurseries in a major hive. I believe I will enjoy the female’s company.”

  “What about the life you’ve built for yourself here?” Flinx asked. “Your career, your future?”